Stovetop Peaches and Ice Cream

Fresh peaches cooked and served over ice cream

Juicy ripe peaches in the summer are a joyous occasion. Their sweet, delicate fragrance alone is enough to carry you adrift over the world in a Chagall-like dream. But there's one thing that's even better than fresh, delicious peaches in the summer and that's fresh delicious peaches with ice cream!

This is a ridiculously simple recipe that I picked up from Bloomberg Businessweek--of all places! Peel and dice 4-6 gorgeous peaches, place them in a skillet, sprinkle in a little bit of sugar, and heat until hot and bubbly. Serve over ice cream and prepare to make Bill Cosby pudding faces. My ice cream of choice is Blue Marble vanilla which is as bright white and creamy as soft serve. To borrow from Woody Allen, I don't love it, I lurv it.

Bloomberg Businessweek suggests that managers make this for their employees instead of the standard make-your-own-sundaes sprinkled with M&Ms. While I do love the recipe, I have to say, I couldn't possibly envision any manager I've ever worked for cooking peaches for anyone in the office. Also, I don't think many offices have stoves. Microwaves, yes, stoves, not so much.

I made this dessert a couple of times over the summer, including once for myself during Hurricane Irene. Like many New Yorkers, I stocked up on nachos and chips and water and braced myself for an indoor cataract to emerge from the ceiling. Fortunately, that didn't happen. So it was in a relaxed state of mind that I was able to sit down to a bowl of warm peaches and Blue Marble ice cream while watching The Conspirator. Great movie. Boy, can Robert Redford tell a story...

The Champagne of Honeys?

Once, while browsing through the Green Market in Union Square, I was told by a honey vendor that a particular honey—twice as expensive as the others—was the champagne of honeys. Like magic, his words seemed to illuminate the precious contents from within, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Not that I didn't appreciate honey before—I've always revered honey as the heart and soul of the kitchen cupboard, but my appreciation, while deep, was limited in scope. There were no kinds of honey, as I saw it, there was just honey.

Through the simple device of a sales pitch, a whole new world opened up to me, a gorgeously bright and meticulous world where fields of flowers are like vineyards ripening in the sun. Why hadn't I ever made the connection? How dumb and blind I've been all these years merely tolerating honey as a healthy sweetner for oatmeal, tea, and the occasional glass of warm milk. I began to fathom the existence of a vast variety of honeys out there, each to be enjoyed and savored for its origin and distinct flavors. Both honey and champagne involve labor-intensive processes—by bee and by man respectively— for the purpose of producing something tasty and wonderful. Both capture the essence of nature at its most exquisite. It's all there in each drop of honey—the beauty, the sweetness, the light—nature's bounty distilled in a golden concentration that drips and pours in languorously slow motion, like a vision of love.

Unlike champagne, honey is literally a key ingredient to enjoying quiet time. Maybe honey is nature's way of telling us to take things slowly, now and then, to savor those magical turns of life's merry-go-round, even when they've disappeared from view.

In the midst of this great honey epiphany was a tiny, tangible spoonful to be sampled. I could only imagine how incredible this honey would taste. The champagne of honeys. No doubt the edible result of the perfect storm of flowers, soil and sunlight. A true nectar of the gods. I braced myself for something wonderful.

Well, let's just say that this locally produced, so-called champagne of honeys, failed to pop my cork. A little too sour of an aftertaste for me. Slightly rank, too. Where are these Brooklyn bees foraging nectar anyway? What sort of control do rooftop apiarists have over their bees' wherabouts? Maybe their bees are dumpster diving on the side, like little winged freegans. Concealing my distaste, I said thank you to the honey vendor and pretended to browse a little longer before making a beeline home.

But the experience wasn't a total loss, I walked away with a newfound appreciation for honey as an inherently opulent food with countless variations. And while I had thus far only tasted the standard table wine version, if there was a champagne version, I knew exactly where I'd find it.


To be continued...

Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill

I don't remember specifically where I've come across references to Boone's Farm, only that it's almost always mentioned with an amusing blend of nostalgia and mock contrition. Long Island, where I grew up, didn't have Boone's Farm, and so my curiosity about it was really strong. There are many flavors in the Boone's Farm family of wines, but the one with the most dedicated fans seems to be Strawberry Hill. There's even a dessert recipe for it. Fascinated, I had to learn more...

Priced at less than $3.00, Boone's Farm falls into a cheap liquor category often referred to as bum wines or bum liquors. Google 'bum wines' and you will find yourself at the threshold of a carnival of brazenly artificial alcoholic beverages that is a marvel to behold. Think Fla-Vor-Ice bars spiked with varying levels of alcohol content. In the context of the cheap wine world, Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill stands out as the fairy princess of the bunch. Its faint pink blush and white label called to my inner girlishness like an Easy Bake Oven. After some online searches, a visit to Trader Joe's and Astor Wines, it was apparent that this wine is not available in Manhattan. Inquiries at wine stores in Park Slope drew baffled smiles but no bottles of the precious strawberry-flavored fluid. So I ordered a bottle online and it arrived three days later.



The crisp, clean bottle arrived cold from the wintry weather—very convenient since I was dying to try it. A quick twist of the white aluminum cap and my curiosity was just a short tilt of an espresso cup from fulfillment. I drank in the chilled pink liquid and a pleasantly familiar candy flavor swelled inside my mouth. Not cotton candy, not lollipop...what was it? Aha! I thought. Watermelon Jolly Rancher! Yes, that was it!




More sipping. The vaguely berry but undeniably pink taste brought to mind the Barbie perfume maker my next door neighbor Helen had and how we'd spent an afternoon cranking these plastic wands filled with various colored fragrance concentrates that would transform tap water into colorful scented elixirs such as rose or strawberry. The more you cranked, the more turns of the wand, hence the darker the color and the stronger the perfume. Needless to say, we cranked those wands like mad alchemists—sampling, at times gasping at our Barbie creations as if we had just created Chanel No. 6 through 10.

How long my mind drifted back to recollections of immortal childhood memories, I don't know, but this stuff is delightful. No, it's not Chablis, but put me back in college with a bottle of this, a Justin Timberlake CD (???), and any one from my top 10 list of favorite guys at school, and years later, I'd probably perk up at the mention of Strawberry Boone's Farm with amused nostalgia and mock contrition, too. And that, to quote Martha Stewart, is a good thing!

The Deal Closer @ The Standard Grill

Square of Chocolate from the Standard Grill in NYC, under the High Line. This is not the dessert showcased in this blog post; I thought it best to leave that as a surprise.


At the Standard Grill, executive pastry chef, Frederick Aquino, has loosened chocolate cake's corset to create a fun and flirty chocolate burlesque called the Deal Closer. A king's portion of fluffy chocolate mousse covered with generous mounds of unsweetened whipped cream and sprinkled with thick chocolate shavings, arrives in a large glass kitchen bowl with two rubber spatulas. One taste and I said to myself about Chef Aquino, I like this man's joie de vivre!

First there's the eye-popping excitement of a big bowl of chocolate mousse. And spatulas, not spoons—what more do you need? Beyond the feast for the eyes, there's the titillating sensation of delving deep into a rugged heap of whipped cream followed next by billowy mousse, and then, fathoms below, a rich bed of chocolate cake. If you decide to tackle this mountain of mousse with a metal spoon, as I did, you can add to your sensory enjoyments, the muffled, hollow, tapping sound of the spoon hitting the bottom of the glass bowl somewhere beneath all that mousse.

As mentioned, the whipped cream is unsweetened, which is brilliant because given the portions too much sugar would really slow you down. The mousse is sufficiently chocolatey with little sprinkles of salt to keep things from getting monotonous. The chocolate cake is actually the most rewarding part of this whole extravaganza, it's like the rich soil you've been mining through all this mousse for.

Tacombi on Elizabeth Street

Food served from the tacomobile at Tacombi.

It was on a very cold night that I went into this exciting new Mexican eaterie, a beachside-themed taco place that embodies the spirit of a long hot summer, even in the dead of winter. Folding aluminum chairs, backyard lights strung across the walls, and, at the very heart of it all, a Volkswagon Kombi, out of which is served a daily menu of tostadas, tamales and tacos, create an appetizing ambience for sure. Inspired by the tasty and cheap street food of Mexico, Tacombi's offerings are appetizer-size and feature shredded meats and authentic-tasting moles and salsas.

Pollo con Mole taco, Tostada de Aguacate and a cold glass of horchata.


I so wanted to pig out at this place, but a couple of factors prevented this from happening. First, the food is tasty, but not mind-blowing. Also, $4 is a lot to pay for miniature portions. After four tacos, i.e. $16, I was still hungry.

That said, the vegetarian Maiz y Poblano tacos are extremely tasty and the Pollo con Mole is...interesting. That's obviously not the greatest of food accolades, but the chicken and brown sauce, while fresh and savory, didn't have that soul-embracing deliciousness that makes tacos and other street food so irresistably awesome. I also tried the Tostada de Aguacate—a crunchy corn tostada topped with mashed avocado, tomatillo and cilantro. I enjoyed it but had to roll my eyes at the reality of paying $4 for a glorified chip with guacamole.


Drink stand where homemade drinks, bottled sodas and tokens for tacos, tomales and tostadas are sold.



Maybe I'll have better luck with Tacombi's breakfast menu...next time.

Great Recipe: Chewy Sugar Cookies

Chewy Sugar Cookies by Linda McClure, courtesy of foodnetwork.com. Photo by Katherine Lee.

I discovered this recipe last year on foodnetwork.com. It is a funtastically foolproof recipe for sugar cookies that are as pleasing to the eye as to the taste. You don't even need a rolling pin and cookie cutters to make them, an added bonus for the countertop-challenged among us. That said, I have used a rolling pin on this cookie dough to cut out small circles with center circles for mini linzer tarts (maybe not the most authentic thing in the world, but it's very good).

I didn't plan ahead for Christmas this year and wound up at the supermarket on Christmas Eve. The only sprinkles left were blue, pink and yellow and nonpareils. Ideally, it would have been nice to include red sprinkles and silver ball sprinkles but in the end, it's all about the cookie!

Perfect Chocolate Cake @ The Chocolate Room

While on a wild-goose chase for a particular brand of dirt cheap wine (see next week's post), in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I came to a screeching halt at a discreet little cafe called The Chocolate Room. The dessert-dedicated menu described a trove of quintessential chocolate delights. It's a compilation of chocolate's best hits—chocolate layer cake, a brownie Sundae and chocolate pudding—together in one little darling of a cafe. The Chocolate Room even has daily specials and homemade ice cream. Menu in hand, I looked forward to someday going inside.

This past Sunday, I returned with a friend and a veni, vidi, vici spirit, to sit and sample the three-layer chocolate cake:



Here it is in the photo above: a neat slice of cake, with the exception of the front corner which I dug into before remembering to photograph it first. As you can see, the pale chocolate frosting has a subtle gloss and contrasts nicely with the dark, reddish brown cake. The texture is firm but moist. As for the taste, hang on to your laptop, it's pure chocolate splendor!

There's only one way to describe a chocolate layer cake with all the right parts—perfect! And this is just one of many dazzling options available at The Chocolate Room to satisfy your hunger for chocolate.